5 Unexpected Ways To Use Fleet Data

Fleet management technology is about much more than simply tracking the location of a vehicle on a screen. Believe it or not, there are some clever things you can do with the data a tracking system provides.

In this post, we’ve decided to put together a list of five unexpected ways our customers (and some of your competitors) have used their vehicle tracking software to get a return on their investment in ways they didn’t expect!

Keep on top of maintenance

Let’s be honest, vehicles breaking down is a fleet manager’s worst nightmare, but with our maintenance report feature this risk can be managed before it becomes problematic. The businesses we work with - no matter how big or small - use vehicle maintenance reports in order to improve flexibility, adapt better to changing situations and ensure they stay compliant.

You can gather insight into when vehicles are getting close to their tax end date, insurance deadlines or are due for a trip to the garage. With a maintenance report, you’ll simply never forget when it’s time to change the tyres on your truck or the windscreen wipers on your van.

Our software gives management the ability to set alerts that notify them whenever their vehicles have driven a certain distance or for a certain amount of hours; firmly keeping management in control by quickly reacting to changing circumstances

See second-by-second vehicle location

Highlighting the precise path travelled by vehicles, it provides real-time visibility into speed, date and time of events, exact location, idle time, harsh braking and other driving behaviours.

Having this additional insight assists our customers in identifying and rectifying poor driving behaviours. It also provides a detailed confirmation of work that may not have been captured during the normal update process and can provide a second-by-second replay of a route taken, giving managers the ability to determine the exact location and when jobs have been completed.

This has been used by our customers which include gritting a companies who can prove where exactly they put down grit on a large car park, as well as airport vehicles who can pinpoint the location of vehicles on the runway.

Black and white unloading times

When you know key metrics about your operations you can spot inefficiencies, improve service and productivity – all within the same breath. Understanding how long your driver’s journey to a customer premises, and how long they have had to wait to unload, is powerful.

A company we work with in Derby had discrepancies with a leading supermarket about the time it was taking to unload products from their vehicle into the depot. This is known as ‘demurrage’ to those working within the haulage sector. Demurrage is charged for waiting times at delivery sites, with the cost typically between £30 and £70 per hour. Without tracking, it is notoriously difficult for a company to prove when the driver says he was waiting at a location, and the people at the delivery site say he wasn’t. The driver of the company we work with complained that he was having to wait too long to gain access to the site, and once he did manage to get into a position to offload, the staff at the supermarket weren’t discharging his goods fast enough.

Naturally, the supermarket disagreed with the above.

The customer decided to start utilising a tailored report to capture precise information on how long their vehicle had been waiting to drop its goods off in order to quash the dispute.

Once the business fired the report up, they could clearly see that their driver was being made to wait for too long outside of the supermarket depot. They sent the evidence to store management who were then able to look at ways to speed up the off-loading time, which meant our customer could fit another job in and increasing their daily productivity. Happy days!

Your fleet in the palm of your hand

Many moons ago it was nearly impossible for management to track their vehicles without the time and effort of getting in direct contact with each driver, but now it’s never been easier. Customers who use our vehicle tracking app can instantly locate the vehicles within their fleet, view their daily activity, identify and route the nearest vehicle to urgent jobs, and send messages to drivers.

The owner of a coach company that we work with uses our app to view the status of his drivers when he’s out on the golf course. If a customer calls him to see when one of his coaches will be arriving, he doesn’t even have to put his club down in order to manage his fleet!

Informative Alerts

One of the most widely used features of our system allows businesses to make sure that drivers stay within the boundaries that a company considers appropriate and provide a brilliant way to monitor drivers more effectively. Management can define an area that they specifically do not want a driver to venture into.

One of our customers recently had an issue with a local school. The head teacher had written to them to say that parents had complained that the company’s vehicles had been driving past the school at busy times, and due to the size and speed of the vehicles, parents were rightly worried about the safety of their children.

Wanting to protect their outstanding local reputation, the business made a promise that drivers would slow down and make an alternative route at busy times. If one of the company’s vehicles did stray into school territory, the head teacher would instantly receive an email from our system informing her of the speed and time.

Since the business used this feature, no issues have been reported and the company’s fine reputation is still in place.

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